Tag Archives: LMS

6 Best WordPress LMS Plugins

[ad_1] If you’re looking for a way to deliver an online course, complete with all the traditional tools and features of a learning management system, then some of the learning management plugins available for WordPress might be able to provide all the functionality you need. By installing the free WordPress content management system, and then one of these online course delivery plugins, you can have your own learning platform for a fraction of the price of an enterprise system like Blackboard, albeit on a much smaller scale. Or, you can deliver some simpler online courses to your audience, either for free or by charging a one-off or recurring subscription fee. What is a Learning Management System Plugin? A learning management system plugin helps you add learning-focused features to WordPress to create, deliver, and manage online courses to people. It also comes with features to help you document, track, and report back to students as they progress through your courses. Learning management systems are very flexible. They offer you the ability to create content, make changes and update information, and manage all your admin tasks from one convenient location. Plus, they make eLearning a cinch for students. All they have to do to access your online courses is log into their account, which is set up on your website. You can use an LMS plugin for structured learning with elements such as quizzes, assignments, grades, etc. Or, you can use it in a simpler way to deliver text or multimedia lessons to your website’s subscribers, which is what a lot of entrepreneurs are doing. Membership Plugins vs. Learning Management System Plugins If you are new to online learning, then it might seem like a membership plugin such as Paid Memberships Pro or MemberPress could handle the functionality required, such as registering users and restricting access to content on your site. However, LMS plugins have learning-specific features at their disposal that make them ideal for delivering learning and teaching online. In fact, they go above and beyond what a WordPress membership plugin might. For example, WordPress LMS plugins includes features like: Quizzes Conditional course progression Student gradebooks Lessons Module and course structures Perhaps best of all, learning management system plugins bring the element of gamification to online learning. In other words, you students will be able to experience game-like features such as point scoring, competition with other students, rules of play, and so much more – all while learning. So while there is some overlap between the two, they do offer distinctly different functionality. In some situations, you might even want to pair them together. With some plugins, you can use a membership plugin to handle the membership/payment parts and then an LMS plugin to handle the course content/learning parts. Other LMS plugins include their own built-in membership features, which eliminates the need to use a separate membership plugin. What to Look for in an LMS Plugin Before we dive into the best eLearning and LMS options for WordPress, here’s what you should look for in your solution: Course Building: you want to be able to create interactive, dynamic, and exciting content for your students. This includes PDFs, videos, and more. Make sure you have access to a solid page builder as well, especially if this is the first time you’re creating an online course. Content Dripping: this feature is great for slowly and progressively releasing course materials to students as they move through your course. Course Progress Information: your students want to know where they’re at in your online courses at all times. So, make sure they can easily access this information. Student Management: you’ll want to know how many students are enrolling in your courses. In addition, you’ll want to be able to manage things like memberships, payments, and account access. Quizzes and Tests: this may seem obvious, but not all LMS plugins will give you the option to quiz and/or test your students. Evaluating how well they’ve learned and retained your content is a great way to congratulate top students. It’s also a good way to determine whether your content is effective or not. Forum Integration: being able to integrate with forum plugins like bbPress or BuddyPress is helpful for boosting student engagement and interaction. You can even chat with students through these forums. Payment Gateway Support: finding a payment gateway that integrates with your LMS plugin is important if you want to make money and not lose a lot of profit to excessive fees. Incentives: being able to reward those doing well, especially in a public way, is a great incentive for your other students to do well too. Things like badges and certificates are better than simple email confirmations because people feel more accomplished with official recognition, especially when they can print it out. Homework Options: make sure the LMS option you choose gives you a way to assign and grade homework submissions with ease. This will improve the learning experience without adding a lot of stress to you. Now that you know what to look for in an LMS plugin, let’s take a look at the best options in the market today. What Are the Best WordPress LMS Plugins? LearnDash – best value LMS plugin and most heavy-duty education features (like SCORM support). LifterLMS – best LMS plugin if you need the most features. WP Courseware – best LMS plugin for quizzes. Teachable – best SaaS LMS tool to integrate with WordPress. Master Study LMS – best free LMS plugin. Sensei LMS – simple LMS plugin from Automattic for WooCommerce users. 1. LearnDash ($199/year) The developers of LearnDash have a background in the learning industry. This means that this plugin has been developed based on the experiences and the knowledge that has been gained from working in that sector. This has contributed to the popularity of LearnDash amongst learning and teaching professionals, and explains why you are likely to see it in use at many universities. If you’re looking for a high quality and robust

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LearnDash Review 2021: The Best WordPress LMS Plugin?

[ad_1] Considering using LearnDash to create online course content with WordPress? LearnDash is a popular WordPress LMS plugin that works for both serious academic institutions, solo course creators, and everyone in between. It can help you create unlimited courses, add unlimited lessons and topics, quiz your learners, require assignments, etc. It also includes built-in features to charge one-time or recurring access fees, as well as advanced features like content dripping, course prerequisites, and more. Overall, it’s definitely one of the top options when it comes to WordPress LMS plugins. And in our hands-on LearnDash review, we’re going to take a detailed look to help you decide whether this plugin is right for you. Here’s how we’ll break up our LearnDash review: Thoughts on the types of users who can benefit from LearnDash A hands-on look at how LearnDash works Seven pros and two cons of LearnDash FAQs about LearnDash Final thoughts Let’s dig in… Who Is LearnDash For? LearnDash is a pretty flexible plugin that can benefit both academic institutions as well as businesses, solo creators, and more. On the academic front, LearnDash supports SCORM and Tin Can API (xAPI) for heavy-duty implementations. The ProPanel feature is also well-suited to academic institutions, as it offers quick assignment management, emailing features, and more detailed learner information/analytics. However, LearnDash can also be quite effective for more small-scale uses, too. For example, if you’re a solo course creator, LearnDash can help you create and deliver free or paid course content to your members, which makes it a great solution for monetizing your site with online courses. It can also be useful to businesses that want to provide training to employees. You can use LearnDash to set up employee onboarding or certification and track your employees’ progress to make sure they’ve completed all the relevant education materials. All in all, you have a lot of different ways to use LearnDash, which is why it’s one of the top WordPress LMS plugins.  How LearnDash Works In this section, I’ll give you a general overview of what it’s like to create course content with LearnDash. Then, in the next section, I’ll single out some specific pros and cons. Basic Setup When you first activate LearnDash, it launches a “bootcamp” guide to show you all the actions you need to take to set up LearnDash. Each step includes a video and text article, and you can mark them as complete as you go through them: Overall, I think this is really convenient as it helps you make sure you’re not missing anything important. Creating a Course Your first step is to add a course. Each course can include unlimited lessons, topics, quizzes, assignments, etc. When you create a course, you’ll see the native WordPress block editor (for the course listing page content), as well as tabs across the top to configure additional options: Using the Course Builder The course builder is one of the most useful features in LearnDash as it lets you set up the structure of your lessons, topics, quizzes, and more using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Lessons are the main knowledge block, and then you can subdivide lessons into topics. You can use the buttons to add new lessons, topics, and quizzes and then drag-and-drop things to rearrange them as needed: Adding Lessons/Topic Content Once you’ve added the high-level structure of your course using the builder, you can open the editors for individual lessons/topics to add the content for those units. When you add a lesson/topic, you can add the content using the regular WordPress block editor. You’ll also get a useful Associated Content box in the sidebar to let you see how this unit matches up to other topics: In the Settings tab, you can also add a dedicated video that users must watch to complete the lesson, as well as configure other features like: Lesson materials (e.g. a PDF checklist) Assignments Lesson timers Adding a Quiz To add a quiz, you’ll get a dedicated quiz builder that works a lot like the course builder. You can add different questions and use drag-and-drop to change their order: If you go to the Settings tab, you can configure more advanced options like the passing score, retakes, question order randomization, a quiz certificate, quiz timer, and more. Setting Up Course Access Once you’ve added and organized your course content, the next step is to control access to your course, which you can do from the course’s settings. You have five options: Open – anyone can access the course. It’s public on your site. Free – the course is free, but people need to register and enroll for it. Buy Now – people pay a one-time fee for access. Recurring – people pay a recurring fee for access. Closed – you must manually add learners (or use a separate payment/membership plugin). You can also set up other restrictions, such as course prerequisites and access expirations: And that’s a general high-level look at what it’s like to create a course with LearnDash. Of course, I didn’t cover nearly every feature, because there are a lot of small options. But you should have a good idea of how it works. LearnDash Pros and Cons – 7 Pros and 2 Cons Now, let’s dig into some of the specific things that LearnDash does well…and some of its weak points. LearnDash Pros 1. User-Friendly Drag-and-Drop Builder I showed you the course builder in the tutorial, but it’s worth highlighting again because it’s such a useful feature. When you have a lot of lessons, topics, and quizzes, it can be hard to visualize how everything fits together and the progression that your students will follow as they move through the course. Having the course builder interface not only makes it easy to see how everything fits, but it also lets you easily make changes using drag-and-drop. It also just generally speeds up your course building because you can easily open the editors for all the course’s content from one spot.

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LifterLMS Review: The Best WordPress LMS Plugin? (2021)

[ad_1] If you’re searching for the best WordPress LMS plugin, you’ve probably come across the name LifterLMS. LifterLMS is one of the more popular options if you want to create an online course with WordPress, thanks in part to releasing the core plugin for free at WordPress.org, where it has a 4.7-star rating and is active on over 10,000 WordPress websites. But is it the right plugin for your course? In our detailed LifterLMS review, we’ll help you decide whether you should use LifterLMS or go with one of the many other WordPress LMS plugins out there. Here’s how we’ll divide our 2021 LifterLMS review: Let’s get started! 🧰 LifterLMS Features To start, we’ll quickly go over the many features that LifterLMS offers. Course features: Drag-and-drop course builder. Multimedia lessons – support for video, audio, text, and image-based lessons. Assignments. Quizzes – with lots of different question types. Gradebooks to show progress, quiz scores, and more. Course prerequisites. Course tracks – e.g. offer a certification when people complete multiple courses in any order. Support for multiple instructors. Course discussion areas. Membership features: Content restriction. Content dripping. Offer sitewide memberships instead of selling single-course access. Special members-only pricing on courses. Payment features: Sell courses for one-time or recurring payments (or make them free). Dedicated payment integrations with Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.net. There’s also a WooCommerce integration that lets you use any of WooCommerce’s gateways. Payment plans (let people spread payments over time). Coupons. Bulk sales to sell access to groups. Affiliate network integrations. Course bundles. Private coaching upsells, along with bundling private coaching and course content. Social learning features: Course achievements to gamify your courses. Course certificates upon completion. Social learning to create course communities. Connect with learners using customizable emails or text messages. Integrations: Email marketing support for WP Fusion, ConvertKit, or Mailchimp. Direct integrations for popular WordPress form plugins – Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms. Zapier integration to connect to the thousands of apps on Zapier. Now, let’s get into the hands-on section of our review… 👷 LifterLMS Course Builder Creating an online course can be time-consuming because you need to set up a lot of different pieces of content and organize everything into a logical structure. To help make this as painless as possible, LifterLMS comes with a drag-and-drop course builder that lets you easily set up the overall structure for your course and then dig into more detailed sections when needed. Creating a Course When you first set up a course, you’ll see the native WordPress block editor, which is where you can set up the course overview content and basic settings. This is not the actual course builder. At the top, you just have the regular block editor, along with some special LifterLMS blocks. And below that, you have the Course Options meta box, which lets you set up basic details like: Estimated completion time. Prerequisites. A featured video. Scheduling. Maximum capacity. Etc. This is also where you can set up payment options, but I’ll cover those in a separate section. Once you’re ready to set up course content, you can click the Launch Course Builder button in the bottom-right corner. Using the Drag-and-Drop Course Builder To organize your courses, you get two levels of content: Lessons – the actual content of your course. Sections – these organize lessons into different categories/units. In the course builder, you can use the buttons and drag-and-drop to create the high-level structure of your course using lessons and sections. Here, you can see the basic structure of a course: You also have the option to compress the lessons under a section, which makes it easier to focus on a specific part of your course. You can see that each lesson has a set of icons beneath it (as well as a different set of icons when you hover over it). These icons let you quickly view/edit a lesson’s content. Some icons will quickly show whether a lesson has certain content attached to it, like video or audio. Other icons let you add a new quiz or assignment or open the lesson’s content editor in a new tab. You can edit basic lesson settings by clicking the icon to open a slide-out. However, you’ll need to open the full lesson editor to add text content: Adding Lesson Content The lesson content editor gives you access to the native block editor to add text/image content, as well as a Lesson Settings box that lets you attach a video or audio file and control other lesson settings. For example, if you’re creating a video course, you can add the video to the Video Embed URL box and then add some companion text using the content editor: The Lesson Settings box also lets you control prerequisites, a content dripping schedule, and some other settings. In the sidebar, you can also see where a lesson fits in the course and quickly jump back to the full course builder. Creating Quizzes To add a quiz, you can work from inside the drag-and-drop course builder by clicking the icon for the lesson to which you want to attach a quiz. Clicking the icon opens a slide-out where you can set up your quiz (or add an assignment): There, you can set up basic details like the passing grade, time limits, attempt limits, and more.  Then, you can start adding questions using a variety of different question types. You get the Basic Questions with the free version but you need the Advanced Quizzing add-on to access the Advanced Questions: And that’s a quick look at what it’s like to create quiz content with LifterLMS. 💳 LifterLMS Payment Options If you’re like many people, you’re probably creating online courses with the goal of monetizing your courses and earning money. Here’s how LifterLMS helps you do that… Charging for Course Access To charge for access to your course, LifterLMS lets you create Access Plans when you edit a course’s settings. When you create an access plan,

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